ADVANCED PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

A Bressanone Retrospective

for Giovanni B. Flores d'Arcais

Edited by Willem J.M. Levelt

Max Planck Institute, Nijrnegen

W.J.M. Levelt (Ed.), (1996)

Advanced Psycho linguistics: A Bressanone Retrospective for Giovanni B. Flores d'Arcais. Nijmegen: MPL

Published by

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Cover: Inge Dohring, Linda van den Akker Illustrations: Bernadette Schmitt

Lay-out and copy-editing: Diete M. Oudesluijs Printed by SSN, PB 1206, NL-6501 BE Nijmegen

© 1996 MPI/the authors

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface VII

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS IN PERSPECfIVE

Jacques Mehler

1969 - The renaissance of psycholinguistics 1 Thomas G. Bever

Experimental psycholinguistics: Then, now and thence 7 Ida Kurcz

Psycholinguistics at the end of the century 17 Btfnedicte de Boysson-Bardies

Bressanone and after: A short, yet productive period 24

PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY

Willem J.M Levelt

Linguistic intuitions and beyond 31

H Wilfred Campbell & Camelis H van Schooneveld

The psychological reality of an ordering of phonological distinctive features 36

THE ACQUISmON OF lANGUAGE

Eve V. Gark

En route to pragmatics 49 Margaret Donaldson

True negatives and false beliefs 55 Robin N Campbell

Semantic development of adjectives 60 Roger Wales

Acquiring comparatives and comparing acquisition 68 Bernard T. Tervoort

Do deaf children still need passive sentences? 75 Dan 1. Slobin

Beyond universals of grammatical development in children 82

PRODUCING AND UNDERSTANDING lANGUAGE

Daniel C. O'Connell, S.! & Sabine Kowal

Good timing: Twenty eight years of team research 93 Herbert H Clark

From comprehension to understanding 99 Merrill Garrett

Counting the cost:

Processing options in symbolic and subsymbolic systems 105 Donald G. MacKay

Ambiguity, language, and cognition: Retrospect and prospect 110 Sheldon Rosenberg

Semantic integration in sentence processing 118 Patricia Wright

Cognitive skills for reading functional texts:

The multiple skills needed for reading in everyday life 122

REASONING

Peter Wason

The selection task: Beyond the first response 133 Philip N Johnson-Laird

The study of deductive reasoning: 1969 - 1996 138 Paolo Legrenzi

Reasoning on Bressanone 145

COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT

John C. Marshall

Raynor's revolution 153

Luigi Pizzamigio, Cecilia Guariglia, Daniele Nico &Alessandro Padovani Two separate systems for space cognition 157

List of contributors 163

...

avances in psycholinguistics ...

Preface

More than a quarter century ago, my friend Giovanni B.

Flores d'Arcais, 'Ino' for short, made me his ally in a bold initiative. He had put his mind on convening a first major psycholinguistics conference at the European continent, first that is since World War II. More specifically, he intended to invite the 'young Turks' who were then zealously advocating a new partnership between psychology and linguistics and to mix them thoroughly with the cream of continental psycholinguistics. Many of these young Turks Ino and I had met during our postdoc at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies (1965-'66), where Jerome Bruner and George Miller had irreversibly changed the scientific conception of mind. But others had been bred in that exceptional, barely European center of excellence, the University of Edinburgh.

Ino skilfully worked his way through fathomless Italian bureaucracy, eventually collecting generous amounts of liras, handpicked the gorgeous old Dolomite city of Bressanone as meeting place, contracted the graceful Elefante Hotel, invited his target participants and was pleasantly surprised by sheer universal acceptance. Eventually, the conference took place in July, 1969. My memory is undecided on whether

Ino attended more to the culinary or the scientific well-being of his guests, but surely, he did plenty of both. The conference was exciting, the moods were high, and a network of contacts was forged that survives till the present day.

Though duly satisfied, Ino tirelessly set out to edit the proceedings, again asking me to join him in the effort. And this was really editing! The book was based on the empirical psycholinguistic conference papers, but it got a logical structure of its own, covering the (then) major areas in psycholinguistics. Additional papers were invited where the conference had left noticeable gaps, and we wrote lengthy explanatory texts to increase the coherence of the book. It worked: Advances in psycho linguistics appeared in 1970 and was so well received that it had a second printing in 1974.

VII

PREFACE

In retrospect, Bressanone has become a landmark in the history of psycholinguistics, and European psycholinguistics in particular. But who cares about the history of psycholinguistics? There is no written record of what happened to

our discipline since the years of the 'cognitive revolution'. Most of our students and younger colleagues are unaware of the battle that was fought to establish cognitive science and about the pioneering role psycholinguistics played in it. Not so Ina. When the 25th anniversary of the Bressanone conference was approaching, he took the initiative to reconvene the meeting in order to consider what had been achieved (and lost) since these early days. Whether it was due to the decline of the Mafia, the cleansing of Ina's ethics by many years of Dutch Calvinism, or the financial suction force of the European Union, the Italian funding agencies approached by Ina didn't give in, and only let him know at a late, too late moment.

Lacking a Bressanone retrospective conference, this book is a second best solution. When Ina's sixtieth birthday (October 3, 1996) came into the offing, I approached all surviving authors of Advances with the request to write a short, retrospective paper about how psycholinguistics, and in particular their own work, had evolved since Advances. "Back to the future", as John Marshall put it. I neither offered elegant lodging nor culinary reward, still to my pleasant surprise my request too met with sheer universal acceptance. The result is a book, not by young Turks, but by established scientists, many of them main players in the recent history of psycholinguistics. Together, we are offering Ino a petite histoire of our field, for whatever it is worth.

This solution is second best, because our special community has not been able to discuss the course of a quarter century of psycholinguistics. And indeed, many of the observations surfacing in this book call for much deeper consideration. The ever-going push and pull between psychology, linguistics and the neurosciences is not fully grasped by anyone, but steadily affecting all of our work in unpredictable ways. A better sense of history would not be a luxury for psycholinguists.

The solution is only second best for another reason as well. It is that one major player did not contribute: Giovanni Flores d' Arcais. Not only would the editing have been so

VIII

PREFACE

much more imaginative (and more pleasant) if he and I had done it jointly, but also the book would have included a much needed retrospective chapter by the 'Urheber' himself. What would Ino have written about? His own chapter in Advances was about the processing of comparative sentences. He reported on remarkable differences in the processing of more .. than and less ... than constructions and adduced the difference to what he called "the focus of comparison". In a sentence like A cat is more friendly than a dog, the subject (A cat) is the focus of comparison, whereas in the sentence A cat is less friendly than a dog this is not the case, a dog being the focus there. The grammatical subject as preferred 'focuser' has been a continuing theme in Ino's subsequent work on sentence understanding and picture verification. Ino would, no doubt, have referred with satisfaction to the recent paper by Lila Gleitman et al. (Cognition, 1996) where exactly the same mechanism, the foregrounding effect of the subject, is invoked to explain the apparently asymmetrical interpretation of symmetric predicates, such as is similar to. Or would Ino have written about any of the other themes in his rich repertoire: sentence parsing, idiom comprehension, object naming and event description, word recognition, the acquisition of function words and connectives, or about his pioneering work in the reading of kanji and Chinese characters? We'll ask him in due time.

Returning, finally, to Bressanone's future, one should ask, How come that the young crowd over there was destined to leadership in late 20th century psycholinguistics and cognitive science? There are, at least, two possible answers. Maybe Ino, in his clairvoyance, made just the appropriate choice of contributors. Or the meeting plus the writing of Advances worked as a latter-day Pentecost, sparking our vocation to study the world's tongues and their use. Either way, Ino did the right thing.

Nijmegen, August 1996

Willem ] .M. Levelt

IX

List of contributors

Thomas G. Bever

Department of Psychology, Cognitive Science, University of Arizona, USA

Benedicte de Boysson-Bardies

Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, CNRS, Paris, France

H. Wilfred Campbell

Studia Interetnica Research, Maarssen, The Netherlands

Robin N. Campbell

Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Scotland

Eve V. Clark

Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, USA

Herbert H. Clark

Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA

Margaret Donaldson

Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Merrill Garrett

Department of Psychology, Cognitive Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

Cecilia Guariglia

Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universita degli Studi di Roma and IRCCS, Roma, Italy

Philip N. Johnson-Laird

Department of Psychology, Princeton University, USA

Sabine Kowal

Institut fur Linguistik, Technische Universitat Berlin, Germany

Ida Kurcz

Institute of Psychology, Polisch Academy of Sciences, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Poland

Paolo Legrenzi

University of Milan, Italy, CREPCO, Aix-en-Provence, France

Willem J.M. Levelt

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Donald G. MacKay

Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

John C. Marshall

Neuropsychology Unit, Department of Clinical Neurology, Radcliffe Infirmary, University of Oxford, England

Jacques Mehler

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales, CNRS, Paris, France

Daniele Nico

Dipartimento di Pslcologia, Universita degli Studi di Roma and IRCCS S. Lucia, Roma, Italy

Daniel C. O'Connell, S.J

Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA

Alessandro Padovani

Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universita degli Studi di Roma and IRCCS S. Lucia, Roma, Italy

Luigi Pizzamiglio

Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universita degli Studi di Roma and IRCCS S. Lucia, Roma, Italy

Sheldon Rosenberg

Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Cornelis H. van Schooneveld

[anua Linguarum Foundation, La Roche-sur-Foron, France

Dan I. Slobin

Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, USA

Bernard T. Tervoort

Professor Emeritus, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Roger Wales

School of Behavioral Science, University of Melbourne, Australia

Peter Wason

Reader Emeritus, Pegasus Group, Oxford, England

Patricia Wright

MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, England